1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to the treatment and rehabilitation of patients having implanted medical devices. More particularly, the disclosure relates to the use of a distributed array of sensors to evaluate the progress of neuro-stimulation patients.
2. Discussion
Implantable neuro-stimulation systems have begun to demonstrate clinical usefulness for a wide variety of conditions such as spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke, Parkinson's disease and Parkinson's tremor. For example, deep brain stimulation (DBS) systems have been used to successfully improve motor control in Parkinson's patients by delivering electrical pulses to selected areas of the brain. While certain developments in neuro-stimulation systems have advanced rehabilitation and treatment in a number of areas, certain challenges remain.
For example, most neuro-stimulation systems focus primarily on the delivery of the electrical pulses to the desired treatment site, with little or no ability to evaluate the progress of the patient. Systems that may have the ability to obtain information from the patient typically obtain data from a single source, and therefore may lack a system-level approach to patient evaluation. Accordingly, while there have been some advances in neuro-stimulation systems, there still remains considerable room for improvement.